Narrow Results

With the popular adoption of information technology (IT), business models and types of services in industries are strongly influenced. Consider the professional service industries such as accounting firms, services are the main business activities in their daily job. These firms are now facing the critical issue on how to apply IT effectively and improve their service quality. The purpose of this paper is to provide a demonstrative analysis for the evaluation of valuable activities in professional service firms via "Value Shop" model. And then find the strategic benefits of IT invested with corresponding value activities by the case study of accounting firms in Taiwan. The findings indicate that IT investment is indeed helpful for activities in daily business activities in such firms, whether it is strategy-centric, managerial, or operational activities.

In this paper, we propose that information technology (IT) managers make investment decisions about new IT initiatives based on a modified rational expectation model. Unlike traditional rational expectation models, we emphasize the relevance of market uncertainty and its impact on the return of new IT investment. This results in information acquisition decisions by managers that can cause information asymmetry. This information asymmetry is endogenous and so the IT manager can become well informed if and only if it is beneficial to do so. We also capture different levels of IT investment across managers by introducing heterogeneity across managers in terms of different levels of initial capital. Based on a simulation analysis to validate our theoretical model, we find that it is the IT manager with larger initial capital outlay who is particularly interested in acquiring information about their IT investments in order to reduce any asymmetry with competitors. Furthermore, we find that holding other things constant, fewer IT investors are informed when information cost increases and in consequence the difference of investment level between the informed and uninformed investors is more pronounced.